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Why is realtime performance so important? What is so bad about summoning another cappuccino while a sequence renders?
“In our facility, rendering is a dirty word,” Cox insisted. “Time waiting for rendering is time wasted – we want to be able to use our time constructively to create high quality results.

“And real time means you get a better result in the end,” he added. “If a finishing touch to make a job perfect is going to take five minutes you will do it. If it is going to take 30 minutes of re-rendering you will not.

“But ultimately the line is that we used to grade in real time, so why should we have to wait now, just because we have gone stereoscopic,” he concluded.
So with the workflow up and running, who is going to be beating a path to the Axis3D/Concrete door to create stereoscopic work? David Cox made a telling point:

“When [Robert Zemeckis’s movie] Beowulf was show in the UK there was not a single 3-D commercial. If yours was the only stereoscopic spot in the theatre, the audience would certainly remember you.”

More likely, though, he thinks that the first business will come from elsewhere. “Realistically we think the first adopters are likely to be corporate communications,” he said. “Most of them are already using large screen environments, and stereo would add huge impact to product launches and trade show presentations.

“After that, certainly we see work from cinema commercials and, we hope from movie production, even Hollywood,” he added. “There is a limited amount of stereo capacity worldwide at the moment, and we think that we are well ahead of the game.

“That is not just in the post capability but, thanks to working with Axis, we have the production capability too, the ability to recommend cameras and rigs,” he explained. “And if stereo is not going to be a gimmick then we need to learn a new language.

“It is a bit like surround sound – when it first came out it was obligatory to have lots of sounds coming from behind you. We have got beyond that stage now, and we have to do that in stereoscopic imaging. Your eyes naturally converge on things that you focus on, which tend to be behind the plane of the screen. Things coming out at you are very unnatural.

“I suspect we are going to find that zooms are uncomfortable in stereo, too, even if we could get over the challenge of ganging two lenses together in precise synchronisation,” he mused. He also added another tip from experience: “I have seen footage where the cameras are half a frame out of sync with each other – that was surprisingly noticeable and quite uncomfortable.”

In conversation with Geoff Harrison of Axis, the subject of camera separation came up. Received wisdom is that the centrelines of the two lenses should be around 65mm apart: the interocular distance, the spacing of human eyeballs. However, this is not practical with most standard cameras unless you want to add more glass to the optical path.

One theory is that camera spacing might be linked to the viewpoint: interocular distance might be right for a camera at roughly human head height, but a high shot looking down could need – or at least tolerate – a wider spacing. Conversely, a low level shot might need the cameras closer together.

Bringing all that cherry-picked technology to bear on stereoscopic productions, what are the implications on workflow? How much harder is it going to be? How much longer will it take?
“If it is a relatively straightforward job, I do not see it taking that much longer than 2D,” Cox claimed. “Working on both channels in realtime on Pablo means that grading and conforming will not change.

“As I said earlier, though, visual effects are likely to take longer because of the challenge of ensuring the correct offsets are drawn on each channel so that the object sits in the right place,” he added. “Tracking marks might have a bit of a resurgence to help keep planes together.

“CGI is naturally 3D anyway, of course,” Cox continued. “You just have to render the finished model twice. I think we will see more interest in creating packshots in CGI for stereo rather than shooting models and mockups.”

“Stereoscopic imaging represents the biggest step change in visual entertainment for a long time,” David Cox of Concrete concluded. “HD does not fundamentally change what you are doing, but stereo most definitely does. In the same way that we can use colour grading to make a scene a sad moment or a happy moment, so stereo could have the same impact. It may have been a bit of a gimmick in the past, but it will become an increasingly important part of the story-telling repertoire.”